Google: Honeycomb was rushed

Andy Rubin says "trade offs" were made in order to get Honeycomb out on time.

Google has admitted that it had to rush the release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb in order to help its partners compete in their burgeoning tablet war with Apple. In an interview with Bloomberg, Android chief Andy Rubin said “design trade offs” had been made in order to help Motorola release the Xoom tablet in February.

Rubin was defending Google’s decision not to release the source code for Honeycomb to anyone who wants it, as it has done with previous versions. He said that the reason was simply that Honeycomb does not work on phones and that it doesn’t want mobile makers to try.

"We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones,” he said. “It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.”

Admitting that he had, “…no idea if [Honeycomb] will even work on phones,” Rubin was adamant that Google is not moving away from Android’s open source ideals. It seems Honeycomb’s early release and locked down nature are simply a byproduct of trying to get a toehold in the nascent tablet market without the worries of fragmentation, which have dogged Google’s OS over the past 18 months.